Ep 120: AI Madness - Round 1 The EdTech Take Out

In the spirit of March Madness and how much we love Iowa Women’s basketball on our team, we have taken this idea of bracket play into the AI world and have come up with four different categories for AI tools. Within those four different categories, we have chosen two tools that we feel fall into that category to match against one another. To compare these two tools, we will share the cost, what integrations the tool has, and usability of the original output. 
 
For the next two weeks, we will advance tools through the bracket and we will share more in-depth analysis of these tools.
 
Main Course: Elite Eight 
 
Bracket 1: Productivity and Communication:
Ghostwrite (Mindy)Cost: 15 emails a month, unlimited for $10/mo
Integrations: Outlook, Gmail, Zendesk
Usability of Original Output: built into your email composer, choose tone, style, length, very little need to revise.

Goblin Tools (Gina)Cost: Free
Integrations: Download as a file, copy and paste
Usability of Original Output: Simplistic, choose tones to communicate, choose level of tone

Bracket 2: Lesson Planning
School AI (Mindy)Cost: teachers get a freemium account, otherwise purchase as a district (schedule a call)
Integrations: download or copy
Usability of Original Output: easy entry point for teachers getting started with AI, provides structures for completing a robust prompt, helps teachers get to a response that they want, sparks some ideas and provides a flow to a lesson

Cuirpod (Gina) Cost: freemium, $7.50/mo  individual account, school license or district license $4000/yr
Integrations: NA (link sharing for adding students to a lesson)
Usability of Original Output: Many of the lessons that are generated are a good “starting point” however, a teacher would want to go through and add additional information and perhaps adjust some of the questions or interactions that Curipod automatically creates with AI.

Bracket 3: Scaffolding
Eduaide (Gina)Cost: Freemium: 15 generations/mo, limited feedback bot Pro account: $6/mo, school and districts accounts
Integrations: NA
Usability of Original Output: Good starting point for ideas, but doesn’t actually create differentiated artifacts. 

Diffit (Mindy)Cost: Free up to 2500 words, $15/mo or district license
Integrations: Print or Download (with free version), paid Google integrations
Usability of Original Output: generates content, paste in text for easy leveling, grade leveling of text can be challenging to decipher–its really about student level so worth a professional eye.

 
Bracket 4: Assessment and Feedback
Brisk (Mindy)Cost: Freemium or District Purchase
Integrations: works with Google docs, but integration into comments is for purchase
Usability of Original Output:, generates feedback with the click of a button: glow and grow, rubric criteria and next steps 

Class Companion (Gina)Cost: Freemium, free for teachers and students, paid school/district account integrates Class Companion into LMS (Schoology and Canvas, with additional features)
Integrations: LMS integration with school or district plan.
Usability of Original Output: Teachers have access to the content library on the free teacher plan. They cannot create a library of their own content. The AI is useful in coaching student and providing them just in time feedback and they are writing. It is transparent to all (students and teachers) they are getting feedback from AI and there is a place where students can dispute feedback they get from the AI. Geared towards an older audience so elementary teachers might not find this as useful.